Monday, March 9, 2015

No. 1 John Wagner

First Prog: (as
scripter, on two separate stories!) Prog 9;

(as character co-creator) Prog 2

Last Prog: may the
day never come!

First Meg: 1

Last Meg: not
bloody likely

Total appearances: 2573 and
counting

-Since there haven’t even been
2000 Progs yet, this seems an impossible number. It’s explained away in that
Wagner has contributed (and sometimes still does today!) multiple stories to
each Prog (I’ve counted these twice on purpose), and not forgetting stories in the
majority of issues of the Megazine (again, sometimes more than one per issue),
each issue of StarLord, nearly every Annual and plenty of specials, too…

…but this magnificent number
doesn’t even include the 287 scripts he wrote for the rather delicious Daily
Star Judge Dredd comic strip.

- Or the 6 scripts he wrote
for the American comics version of Judge Dredd

- Or the many, many, stories
he has written for publications such as Eagle, Toxic!, Scream, Battle/Action and
so on.

John Wagner, in disguise as John Howard, bashes out script after script.
Art by Carlos Ezquerra

(not to mention: Darkie’s
Mob, The Bogie Man, Bob the Galactic Bum, with origins elsewhere, but reprinted
in the Megazine, which episodes I did
include in the count)

Other 2000 AD story credits:

MACH 1, various Future
Shock style one-offs

Notable character creations:

See above – it would
take all day to list the many weird and wonderful characters Wagner has created
for recurring use (e.g. PJ Maybe; Frinton and Clacton Fuzz), and all week to
list the inordinate number he has tossed off for use in Dredd one-off stories
alone (perhaps the ultimate example being the wonderfully-named and wickedly
executed Rinus Limpopop Quintz). The man puts almost every other comics creator
to shame with his near-continuous output of genuinely engaging characters for
the most incidental of uses. With, I re-iterate, supremely well-chosen names.*

Writing entire epsiodes in somng/rhyme form - others do it, too, but Wagner seems to have a special affinity for it. He’s also
celebrated for his very terse panel descriptions that many artists have found
freeing, allowing them to go crazy with their depictions of, say, Judge Dredd,
his bike, his gun, and the city he lives in. Oh, and he’s perhaps the
undisputed master of writing long, long stories that remain exciting as
individual episodes as well as being coherent and dramatic over a long chunk –
a lost art in comics, I feel.

Wagner writes the best class of idiots.
Art by Steve Brown

On John:

All around, JohnWagner has been a busy man. In a large number of Progs he has written multiple stories. And the longest stretch between Wagner-penned stories is a mere 96
Progs, from the end of Button Man in Prog 791 to the start of Judge Dredd:
Conspiracy of Silence in Prog 889. Of course, during that time he was hardly
idle, writing monthly Dredd scripts for the Megazine, a modest comedy hit with
Al’s Baby, and the absolute classic Return of the Taxidermist.

Indeed, it’s only in recent
times that readers who enjoy both 2000 AD and the Megazine have had to suffer the
occasional lack of Wagner for weeks or months at a stretch. Years, never.

I don’t think there’s
any doubt that by any set of criteria, John
Wagner is the man.

He will forever be
celebrated for Judge Dredd, a character he was, we’re told, inspired to create
by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. To my mind, his second-most beloved creation -
Strontium Dog - owes a certain debt to Mr Eastwood as well, from his westerns.
Indeed, it seems to me that one way into the work of Wagner is through action
cinema of the 1970s.

As seen in many
thrillers from this decade, Wagner’s men are stoic, generally competent without
being superhuman, and handy in a fight. They aren’t prone to whining like so
many superheroes, they’re not over the top with quips and muscles like the 80s
action stars, and while Wagner’s hard men are not averse to the idea of a
romantic liaison, they don’t really care if they’re in a relationship or not.

Stone cold antiheroes
Art by Arthur Ranson

Wagner’s stories have characters
and a plot, and no mucking about with being pretentious. But that’s not to say
there’s no substance! Again, as found in 70s cinema (both the high-end productions
and the delights of genre and exploitation films), lurking inside most Wagner
scripts there’s a layer of social commentary that you can ignore if you want,
but it’s there for you to enjoy as well. A very tricky thing that, to fit commentary
in without making it preachy, or, even worse, so obvious as to become text
rather than subtext.

And who needs subtext when you can have straight up satirical text?This piece from 1979 predicts today's current state of talent-show telly, which has of course been around for aaaages.Art by Ron Smith

But he isn’t just a
man of action. Wagner is one of the only 2000 AD writers to score hit after hit
with his comedies. 2000 AD is full of humour, but Tharg only occasionally commissions
explicitly funny strips. This is probably
because they’re often miserably bad, as seen in, say, Captain Klep or the Space
Girls. But Wagner pulled out RoboHunter, Ace Trucking Co**, Young Death and
Al’s Baby, just to name the most overtly funny ones. Let’s not forget, in both
the foreground and background of many Dredd tales there’s a thick seam of
sarcasm, send-up, slapstick and delightfully pithy one-liners.

Art by Ian Gibson

Of course, Wagner also
suffered the fate of being too clever for his own good with Teen Tax Consultant
- a lovely comedic idea with nowhere to go plotwise; and the Balls Brothers – a
superhero satire so scathing that it left no room for readers to get behind the
characters***.

Teen tax consultant has its moments, for sure.
Art by Ian Gibson

It’s not all laughs.
While it’s ludicrous to compare comedy strips to straight strips and argue
about which is ‘better’, some would say that Wagner’s very best 2000 AD output
is his serious drama, for example Portrait of a Mutant, America, the Button Man
series and Song of the Surfer**** Of course, in every one of these tales Wagner
cannot resist dropping in generous dollops of wry humour amongst the pathos.

Ms Beeny remembers an assault.
Art by Colin MacNeil

It’s important to note
that Wagner the writer is much loved for his collaborations, especially with
one Alan Grant (who will feature in the count-up really rather soon!), but also,
in his pre-2000AD days, with Pat Mills. Could anyone imagine a more delicious
trio of candid conversation, fertile imaginations and work ethic in a room
together?

The Wagner/Grant
writing team is the stuff of legend, mostly of course for the quality of
stories they wrote, but also for the sheer volume of output. Prog 476is
especially notable for featuring 5 separate stories written by the pair! (At
least, I assume they’re all joint efforts. A small part of me wonders if Bad City Blue was Alan Grant on his own,
but I don’t think so). The only thing keeping it from being the Wagner/Grant
show were the back pages, featuring the loveable lunacy of Sooner or Later.
(And in fact those five strips ran for quite a while either side of Prog 476,
too, but with fewer pages and a future shock or two for authorial variety.)

I don’t know about
you, but I find it near impossible to tell the difference between a Wagner solo
script and a Wagner collaboration. A sure sign that the collaboration is
working well, especially given how outspoken both Mills and Grant come across
in interviews! I suppose that Shako!
(the only Wagner/Mills collaboration for the House of Tharg) displays a certain
crazed over-the-top quality that smacks of Mills’s involvement, while many
classic-era Dredds and Strontium Dogs are laced with that bit
of extra humour which I associate, perhaps wrongly, with Grant. The point is,
Wagner works as well in company as he does flying solo. Likely this means he’s
a decent chap, which isn’t relevant, but never hurts when appreciating an
artist’s work.

It’s a sure bet that
without John Wagner’s input, 2000 AD would not have survived to the end of the
80s and very probably the 90s, too. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that
whenever he’s in the Prog in the 2010s, there a subtle but noticeable sales
spike, too…

John Wagner, we salute
you.

My personal favourites:

Shako!

Strontium Dog: Bad
Boys Bust; The Kreeler Conspiracy

RoboHunter: Verdus;
The Filby Case

The Mean Team

Ace Trucking Co: the
Doppelgarp

The Dead Man

Button Man 1 and 2

Return of the
Taxidermist

Judge Dredd: Judge
Death; Blobs; The Magnificent Obsession; It pays to be Mental; Oz; PJ Maybe,
Age 13; Curse of the Spider-Woman; Young Giant; Necropolis; Hottie House siege;
Total War; Ratfink (gosh, listing favourite Wagner-penned Dredd stories is the
sort of challenge that could take up pages and pages of text, isn’t it!)

Banzai Battalion:
Robot Wars

Art by Henry Flint

*If there’s one thing
today’s excellent crop of Dredd-writers haven’t quite got the knack of, it’s
choosing just the right name for Mega City 1’s blocks (Or maybe it’s just that
because I’m of a younger generation, I often didn’t/don’t catch Wagner’s
references, so they feel subtler than those of my contemporaries)

**OK, I understand
that a vocal minority doesn’t find Ace Trucking to be that funny. But lots of
people must have done, because the creators tried to kill the series twice and still brought it back owing to
reader demand! I loved it then and love it still.

***Well, I didn’t much
like it anyway, but that may well be because I actually like superhero comics?
Kev Walker’s art was great, mind.

****At the time it was
first published, anyway. The bloom seems to have come off that rose in the last
20 years. Still good, still liked, but not, I suspect, showing up in ‘best
ever’ lists. [I like to imagine there are small armies of 2000AD fans who dream
up such lists on a semi-regular basis. Sniff. I’m so alone.]